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The Chinese calendar, in its essential structure, has not changed in about five thousand years. Until the middle of the 20th century, the document was considered sacred, and the penalty for tampering with the calendar was death. One might wish that similar strictures had been applied to politicians in the West. |
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There is no single basis for the Chinese calendar. Rather, the calendar is a complex system of interrelated parts. Here, I consider the most important of these. |
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9.10.2.1.1
Sexagenary Day Cycle |
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Perhaps the oldest Chinese system for recording and organizing time is a sexagenary cycle applied to periods of 60 days. |
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In this cycle, every day is designated by a pair of characters, known as the Celestial Stem and the Earthly Branch. There are 12 Branches, and these have the names of animals. These are familiar to many Western readers as the "Chinese zodiac". |
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There are also 10 Stems, and these are not as well known in the West. The prime factors of 10 are (25) and those of 12 are (223), so the least common multiple is (2235), or 60. The system assigns a pair of characters, one stem and one branch, to each day in a cycle of 60 days. The cycle repeats endlessly. |
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Some Chinese tradition has certain of the names originating as early as the 27th century B.C. The books recording the dates, however, were written no earlier than the sixth century B.C. The oracle bones dating from Shang dynasty times (18th to 12th centuries B.C.) do, in fact, bear stem and branch characters, and the Shang calendar uses the 60 names in a 60-day cycle. I cannot say exactly when the sexagenary cycle was invented, but it is of great antiquity. |
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The 60-day cycle was divided into 6 hsun, each of 10 days. The first day of each hsun contains the stem name chia, so the hsun are often known as "the six chia". |
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When used to enumerate days, the sexagenary cycle is known as kah-chih. |
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9.10.2.1.2
Sexagenary Month and Year Cycle |
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The sexagenary cycle was apparently not applied to months or years during Shang times. Books of the later Chou dynasty (12th to third centuries B.C.) occasionally supply names from the cycle when indicating lunar months or the years of a monarch's reign. |
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In later times, the cycle was applied more uniformly to months and years, and earlier dates received a designation with this system which they may not have had originally. A literary tradition of great length, such as the Chinese, always presents the danger that later commentaries may backfill information, ascribing to earlier sources information that those sources did not contain. |
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